Illegal Downloading, the RIAA, and College Campuses

According to a report (which I cannot find online) in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the recording Industry association of America (RIAA) is planning a crackdown on illegal file sharers. The RIAA recently sent out letters to campuses with the IP addresses of computers from those campuses that have been traced to the most extensive illegal sharing. The universities were to give the letters to the students tied to those IP addresses or else face lawsuits. The letters to the students, meanwhile, ask for a settlement payment of $3000 to be paid within a few weeks or else they RIAA will sue for the asserted value of each illegal downloading or file sharing.

The campus that has the most extensive violations? Ohio University. The rest of the top five are Purdue, the University of Nebraska, the University of Tennessee, and the University of South Carolina. (Full disclosure: I did my PhD at Ohio and was a fellow at USC's Institute of Southern Studies for a year, though I actually only spent a couple of weeks in residence.)

I am, frankly, torn about the RIAA approach. On the one hand, it seems monumentally dumb to alienate the single largest and most important music-consuming demographic. This approach seems heavy-handed. It smacks of bullying. It also reveals just how far behind the technological curve the RIAA is.

At the same time, we live in a post-Napster age. No one can reasonably assert, especially if they are a college student, that they are not aweare of the difference between illegal and legal file-sharing and downloading. Some of the users being targeted have downloaded thousands of songs.

It would be nice if the RIAA chose lenience. Scare these kids and make sure they are aware that they only get a pass because of the largesse of the RIAA but that in exchange, from here on out their campus will have to ensure that any targeted student's usage will be strictly monitored. Intellectual property matters, and its theft -- whether through plagiarism or illegal downloading -- is not a victimless crime. At the same time, kids have been making mix tapes and trading bootlegs for ages, and those practices, far from proving detrimental to the music industry, has actually almost universally fueled consumption, album sales, and concert attendance. In a lot of ways, file sharing and downloading simply takes the place of listening to wretchedly restrictive homogenized radio formats where a virtual payola system dominates. Make sure these kids share music the right way, but keep in mind that alienating your loyalist constituency is a dumb business practice.